It has now been more than 30 years since I lived in the Boston area but Boston stays with you forever.
I lived in West Somerville, near Powder House Circle, which is a few blocks east, if I’ve recalled my geography correctly, of the Cambridge line and Massachusetts Avenue, and just south of Tufts University and the Medford and Arlington boundaries. Somerville is where I discovered Steve’s Ice Cream, started by Steve Herrell seven years earlier on Elm Street in Davis Square in Somerville in 1973, which was hand-stirred in the front window in a Nashua, New Hampshire-made four-and-a-half gallon Triple Motion dasher White Mountain rock-salt and ice freezer, making for a ice cream based on a low overrun, or the amount of air in the ice cream while freezing, with “mix-ins” like Heath® Bar Crunch added at the counter. At the very center of the twin-blade dasher White Mountain rock-salt and ice freezer is a center blade turning clockwise while the other blade turns counter clockwise, which are in a canister that also turns clockwise. This triple-motion action mixes and folds the ingredients completely creating smooth and creamy homemade ice cream.
What you need to know about northern New Englanders is they are crazy in love with their super premium ice cream. And I’m not shitting you on that, as a New Englander might well say in a way that sounds much less vulgar verbally in Massachusetts than it probably appears here in print. Some things do sort of get a bit lost in translation. To say I was surprised to discover how much residents of Massachusetts and Vermont in particular love their ice cream year-round would be a really big understatement. Up until then, I had lived all of my life in Southern Ontario in Canada, just a bit to the northwest side of the Adirondacks, and the climate I was used to was at most just a few degrees colder than much of northern New England. And, hey, I liked my Central Smith Creamery ice cream, found between Peterborough and Bridgenorth from what had started out as a farmer’s co-op in 1896, expanding to scooping ice cream in 1979, just fine, but they very sensibly, or so I thought anyway, closed their retail window at the creamery for the winter given the almost zero demand for a cone in December, January and February. Canadians, eh?
New Englanders are fanatics, however. Fanatical about ice cream any time of year; fanatical about their Bruins, as I discovered sitting in the “Gallery of the Gods” high up in the cheap seats in the old Boston Garden; and fanatical about the Red Sox, I also discovered sitting behind the “Green Monster,” the 37-foot, two-inch high left field wall at Fenway Park, which is only 310 feet from home plate.
I actually worked for a few weeks right in Harvard Square in Cambridge for yet another ice cream joint, Brigham’s Ice Cream Parlor during the long ago summer of 1980 (no relation to Brigham’s briar pipes, founded by Roy Brigham in his pipe repair shop in Toronto in 1906), the legendary Boston ice cream shop founded in 1914 by Edward L. Brigham. Sadly, neither Steve’s or Brigham’s has their ice cream parlor businesses in the Boston area any longer, although you can still find tubs of ice cream distributed under their brand in New England grocery stores, or at least so I’m given to understand.
I can’t remember now if we sold burgers at Brigham’s Ice Cream Parlor in Harvard Square and actually had grill cooks or just ice cream and pop, but what I recall most was it was a cultural introduction to those small but significant differences between Canadians and Americans. I used to actually work the cash and give customers their orders on occasion.
Around the Boston area the most common term used for chocolate sprinkles on ice cream is “jimmies,” which I got used to more or less soon enough. But every time someone bought a cold drink in one of those waxed cups, I’d ask if they wanted a lid with it. Invariably they would look happily stunned, while my co-workers would just look plain stunned. A “lid” was a drug term not much used in Southern Ontario at the time but apparently universally used in Massachusetts in 1980 for either an ounce or gram of marijuana, depending who you ask for the history of the measurement (which some say relates to coffee cans). “Do you want a lid with it?” made me a very popular Brigham’s employee during my brief tenure in Harvard Square.
Ice cream is the stuff of legend in New England. And no ice cream scoopers have been more legendary than Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenberg (a.k.a Ben & Jerry). Their story of meeting in Grade 7 gym class in 1963 at Merrick Avenue Junior High School, as two chubby kids who liked to eat and disliked running track, while growing up in suburban Long Island, New York – and then in their mid-20s, after Greenberg had been rejected from some 20 medical schools and was not content to work as a lab technician – splitting the cost of a $5 Pennsylvania State University correspondence course in ice cream-making with Cohen, so that on Saturday, May 5, 1978, with $12,000 scraped together from loans and savings, they opened Ben & Jerry’s Homemade, Inc. in a renovated gas station at the corner of St. Paul and College streets in Burlington, Vermont, has been told now so often for so long, it is as smooth and as well crafted, as, well, a pint of Chunky Monkey Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream. In 1980, they were still showing movies on summer Saturday nights on an outside wall of the gas station, I remember.
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